How To Get Them Off The Farm

Every Secretary of Agriculture would like to leave, as a monument to his administration, a long-range farm program. But whenever farm groups face a price decline or crop failure, they set up such a political yowl the secretary must turn from his planning and play the role of fireman. Ezra Benson has discovered this early. Fanned by a gradual price decline, a sudden fear is sweeping the prairies, causing new agricultural groups to demand shelter from the free market.

Emergency farm practices have included plowing crops under, drowning potatoes, and guaranteeing parity prices. Whatever the financial maneuver, it has artificially boosted farm prices at the expense of the food-buyer, the tax-payer, or both.

While all schemes take it for granted that farmers cannot hold their own in the free market, they have all ignored the basic cause; there are too many farmers in the United States. A revolution in farming techniques has meant that fewer farmers can grow more than enough food to fill American stomachs. Competition with Canada, Australia, and Argentina has made the government unable to trade excess food in foreign markets except at prices well below parity. In business, this pair of events would force migration to other industries. But farmers have tenaciously clung to their homesteads, counting on governmental laws to save them from the law of supply and demand.

Any long-range farm program, therefore, should look beyond guaranteeing income toward inducing farmers to hop the industrial bandwagon. Foreclosed mortgages or governmental evictions are not the ways to do this. Locating new industries near farm areas is. Some farm states, notably Mississippi and South Carolina, have already tried to balance agriculture with industry by offering low taxes and ready-built plants to industries that will offer farm labor new employment.

The brains behind Benson's hoped-for long range plan should try to tempt this needed migration on a slow but national scale. Any long-range program that does not reduce the number of farmers is doomed to the same recurring emergencies and artificial price props that have plagued past farm policies and will continue to do so.